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Global Transformation (global + transformation)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences83%

Selected Abstracts

Global Transformations and New Conflicts

IDS BULLETIN, Issue 2 2001
Mary Kaldor
Summaries The central argument of this article is that a central feature of post-Cold War conflicts has been the delegitimisation of public authority, interacting with globalisation, through a process which is almost the reverse of state and nation-building. The political economy of the ,new wars' involves a mix of state and non-state, national and international violence. It creates vicious cycles, reinforcing the decline in the formal sector, breaking down the distinction between public and private spheres, and mobilising identity cleavages through strategies of fear and hate directed against civilians. These vicious cycles can only be broken by peace strategies, whose centrepiece, over the longer run, is the restoration of legitimate authority and the democratisation of politics. These strategies cannot, in a world in which the state has been eroded, be confined just to the state, but must also involve many other layers of political authority, from the local to the global. [source]

Applications of numerical eigenfunctions in the fractal-like finite element method

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR NUMERICAL METHODS IN ENGINEERING, Issue 4 2004
D. K. L. Tsang
Abstract The fractal-like finite element method is an accurate and efficient method to determine the stress intensity factors (SIF) around crack tips. The use of a self-similar mesh together with the William's eigenfunctions reduce the number of unknowns significantly. The SIFs are the primary unknowns and no post-processing is required. In all previous studies, we used the analytic eigenfunction expression to perform the global transformation. However, the eigenfunction cannot be found analytically in general crack problems. Two-dimensional axisymmetrical cracks are considered here. The resulting static equilibrium equations in local co-ordinates are non-homogeneous ordinary differential equations, for which the analytic eigenfunction cannot be found completely. We use a finite difference method to determine all the eigenfunctions needed numerically. Our evaluated SIF values show very close agreement with published results. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

LIVING A DISTRIBUTED LIFE: MULTILOCALITY AND WORKING AT A DISTANCE

ANNALS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL PRACTICE, Issue 1 2008
Brigitte Jordan
In the last few years, new collaboration and communication technologies have led to a deterritorialization of work, allowing for the rise of new work- and lifestyles. In this article, I use my own transition from the life of a corporate researcher to that of a multilocal mobile consultant for tracking some of the patterns I see in a changing cultural and economic environment where work and workers are no longer tied to a specific place of work. My main interest lies in identifying some of the behavioral shifts that are happening as people are caught up in and attempt to deal with this changing cultural landscape. Writing as a knowledge worker who now moves regularly from a work,home place in the Silicon Valley of California to another in the tropical lowlands of Costa Rica, I use my personal transition as a lens through which to trace new, emergent patterns of behavior, of values, and of social conventions. I assess the stresses and joys, the upsides and downsides, the challenges and rewards of this work- and lifestyle and identify strategies for making such a life successful and rewarding. Throughout, there emerges an awareness of the ways in which the personal patterns described reflect wider trends and cumulatively illustrate global transformation of workscapes and lifescapes. These types of local patterns in fact constitute the on-the-ground material reality of global processes that initiate and sustain widespread culture change and emergent societal transformations. [source]

Global Religious Transformations, Political Vision and Christian Witness,

INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF MISSION, Issue 375 2005
Vinoth Ramachandra
From the nineteenth-century onwards religion has been, and continues to be, an important resource for nationalist, modernizing movements. What was true of Protestant Christianity in the world of Victorian Britain also holds for the nationalist transformations of Hindu Neo-Vedanta, Theravada Buddhism, Shintoism and Shi'ite Islam in the non-Western world. Globalizing practises both corrode inherited cultural and personal identities and, at the same time, stimulate the revitalisation of particular identities as a way of gaining more influence in the new global order. However, it would be a gross distortion to identify the global transformations of Islam, and indeed of other world religions, with their more violent and fanatical forms. The globalization of local conflicts serves powerful propaganda purposes on all sides. If global Christian witness in the political arena is to carry integrity, this essay argues for the following responses, wherever we may happen to live: (a) Learning the history behind the stories of ,religious violence' reported in the secular media; (b) Identifying and building relationships with the more self-critical voices within the other religious traditions and communities, so avoiding simplistic generalizations and stereotyping of others; (c) Actively engaging in the political quest for truly participatory democracies that honour cultural and religious differences. In a hegemonic secular culture, as in the liberal democracies of the West, authentic cross-cultural engagement is circumvented. There is a militant secularist ,orthodoxy' that is as destructive of authentic pluralism as its fundamentalist religious counterpart. The credibility of the global Church will depend on whether Christians can resist the totalising identities imposed on them by their nation-states and/or their ethnic communities, and grasp that their primary allegiance is to Jesus Christ and his universal reign. [source]

Metropolitanism and the Transformation of Urban Space in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Metropoles

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 1 2001
Robert Rotenberg
In this paper, I argue that the nineteenth-century movement of "metropolitanism" was a transnational attempt to rebuild and re-imagine cities in a bourgeois image and through a capitalist process of investment. This movement began with the attempt by wealthy residents of imperial metropoles to remake their cities in ways that created greater social distance between themselves and their colonies,both external and internal. I explore how a discourse with specific urban content can engender a movement that revolutionizes people's view of the city. The analysis points toward a revitalization of this movement in the present moment of global transformations, suggesting that the reshaping of urban social organization and urban institutions through transnational processes is not new. [urban, metropolitanism, colonialism, housing, architecture] [source]

Global Connections and Practicing Anthropology in the 21st Century

ANNALS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL PRACTICE, Issue 1 2006
Carole E. Hill
This chapt er examines the major themes in the chapters that compromise this volume by discussing how the practice of anthropology across nations and regions of the world is changing as a result of globalization. Several themes are delineated that reflect a unity of purpose and concern about the development and structure of practicing and policy anthropology in the 21st century. Divergent viewpoints among the chapters are also examined. Through comparing and contrasting the major points of the chapters, four major interconnected themes are discussed. They are: 1) local/global transformations: challenge to the traditional; 2) the power of practicing anthropology in local/global contexts; 3) academic and practicing transformations, and 4) the closing gap between colonized and colonizer nations. These themes have important implications for the future of global practice and present challenges to the organization and uses of the products of anthropological inquiry. [source]